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Pakistan Flood Sets Back Infrastructure by Years

Girls at a water pump in Sukkur, Pakistan. Floods have forced many Pakistanis from their homes and into roadside camps.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

SUKKUR, Pakistan — Men waded waist deep all week wedging stones with their bare hands into an embankment to hold back Pakistan’s surging floodwaters. It was a rudimentary and ultimately vain effort to save their town. On Thursday, the waters breached the levee, a demoralizing show of how fragile Pakistan’s infrastructure remains, and how overwhelming the task is to save it.

Even as Pakistani and international relief officials scrambled to save people and property, they despaired that the nation’s worst natural calamity had ruined just about every physical strand that knit this country together — roads, bridges, schools, health clinics, electricity and communications.

The destruction could set Pakistan back many years, if not decades, further weaken its feeble civilian administration and add to the burdens on its military. It seems certain to distract from American requests for Pakistan to battle Taliban insurgents, who threatened foreign aid workers delivering flood relief on Thursday. It is already disrupting vital supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan.

The flooding, which began with the arrival of the annual monsoons late last month, has by now affected about one-fifth of the country — nearly 62,000 square miles — or an area larger than England, according to the United Nations.

At the worst points, the inundation extends for scores of miles beyond the banks of the overflowing Indus River and its tributaries, said Cmdr. Iqbal Zahid, a Pakistani Navy battalion commander in charge of rescue operations in Sindh Province.

“You have to highlight that the infrastructure all the way from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to Sindh is ruined,” Commander Zahid said, referring to Pakistan’s northernmost and southernmost provinces. “It will take years to rebuild.”

Nearly 20 million people have been significantly affected, about the population of New York State, the United Nations said. The number in urgent need is now about eight million and expected to rise. More than half of them are without shelter.

The government’s estimates of the damage are equally grim. More than 5,000 miles of roads and railways have been washed away, along with some 7,000 schools and more than 400 health facilities.

And the agency has spent $200 million to rebuild just 56 schools, 19 health facilities and other services since the momentous earthquake in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir in 2005.

One estimate, in a joint study from Ball State University and the University of Tennessee, put the total cost of the flood damage at $7.1 billion. That is nearly a fifth of Pakistan’s budget, and it exceeds the total cost of last year’s five-year aid package to Pakistan passed by Congress.

Standing on the edges of the floods, the scale of the damage is evident. The water has torn mile-long breaches atop two of the main canals in Sindh Province, where tens of thousands of people were evacuated Thursday. Until the gaps can be repaired, water will continue flooding districts along the right bank of the Indus, officials said.

Floodwaters have ripped up the road from here to Jacobabad, cutting off the main highway that reaches both Baluchistan Province, Pakistan’s poorest, and into Afghanistan, one of the main supply routes used by United States forces.

What the waters have not destroyed, rescue workers have been forced to, in some cases. In the southern provinces, Pakistani government workers pointed out places where they had to blow up roads, embankments and even the railway line to steer the flow of water away from the larger towns.

The velocity of the floods was greatest in northern Pakistan, home to steep mountain valleys, and the infrastructure damage there was the worst.

The mountainous Swat Valley, which was still struggling to rebuild from the army’s campaign against Taliban insurgents, has lost every bridge and whole sections of its roads. An entire neighborhood of the town of Madyan, along with the hospital compound and an electricity station, were swept away, leaving sand and stones in their place.

Great chunks of the famed Karakoram Highway — a celebrated feat of high-altitude engineering built by the Chinese over two decades — have disappeared as cliffs fell away in the torrent. The route, which winds hundreds of miles from the Chinese border in the Himalayas to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, may now be impassable for years, officials said.

A number of hydroelectric dams in the north, which are being built by China, have also been damaged. Five workers, including two Chinese engineers and three Pakistanis, drowned when floods swept through one construction camp earlier this month, the government reported.

The United States has agreed to help the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank conduct a damage and needs assessment for the Pakistani government. The figure is bound to be big.

The recovery cost will have to be met by a mixture of domestic money, international donations and loans from development banks, the administrator of A.I.D., Dr. Rajiv Shah, said after a tour of flooded regions on Wednesday.

The lack of electricity, especially through the infernally hot summer months, is a constant problem for the government and a reason for repeated strikes and public protests throughout Pakistan, even in ordinary times. The damage to the electricity and power sector alone could run to $125 million, according to a government report shown to The New York Times.

Water and energy were a prime focus of the five-year $7.5 billion American aid package for Pakistan passed by Congress last year. The Obama administration had hoped to use the legislation as the centerpiece of a lasting strategic partnership with Pakistan and to help buttress the economy and Pakistan’s weak government institutions.

Now, American officials fear that money will end up being spent just to get Pakistan back to where it was before the “super flood.” The United States has already redirected $50 million of the aid package to help with the flood recovery, and the disaster will force a review of all projects that had been planned, Dr. Shah said.

“Priorities will necessarily have to shift and shift so that there is more of a recovery and reconstruction approach than people were thinking just a few months ago,” he told reporters during a trip to Sukkur.

He and other American officials are insisting that the disaster be treated as an opportunity for Pakistan to “leapfrog” ahead and help it build water and energy systems better than what was destroyed.

They point to successes that grew out of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, namely the creation of the National Disaster Management Administration, which is now spearheading the government response to the floods. But diplomats said government accountability and reforms in the rule of law would have to accompany the effort and the aid money.

“This is going to be very, very difficult, this is a huge scale disaster,” Dr. Shah said. “But we have to continue to be optimistic and look for those opportunities to help Pakistan to use this to build back better.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Much of Pakistan’s Progress Is Lost in Its Floodwaters. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe